Schmaltzy, preachy, pushy comedy on the subject of second chances and fresh starts. A Jewish widow gets "picked up at her own husband's funeral" by a gate-crashing Italian who has loved her from afar for twenty-odd years. The Italian is the movie's biggest problem, partly because the role is cast …
Eternal issues of truth and illusion, real life and fiction, addressed with Henry Jaglom's customary garrulity and inexactitude: the subject matter is strong enough to survive. In a self-reflexive (or just self-conscious) storyline, Jaglom plays a Jaglomesque filmmaker who courts an attractive French journalist (Nelly Alard) at the Venice Film …
Maurizio Nichetti (The Icicle Thief) makes like a silent-film clown in the role of a sound-effects dubber for old black-and-white cartoons and, for a change of pace, a porn film. Anything goes: slapstick; T&A; animation mingled with live action in a way that recalls Cool World or Who Framed Roger …
Scriptwriter Neal Jimenez, writing about what he knows, has written a script about a writer (novelist) paralyzed after breaking his neck in a hiking accident. Not for nothing has this been self-designated a No Frills Film Production: the scope of the action is confined to his period in the hospital; …
A lump of unmalleable literariness, extracted from a novel by Graham Swift. We have once again the illusion-shattering device of obviously different actors playing the same character at different ages, a device made doubly intolerable by the continual switching back and forth in time and the fairly equal amounts of …
Not the first Saturday Night Live skit to be built out into a feature film. But not as much to build around as The Blues Brothers (movie of the same name), or anyhow not as much actually built. And what has been built tends to stay out of striking range …
A well-to-do English widow (Helen Mirren), touring Italy, flouts convention and marries a much-younger local (Giovanni Guidelli, looking like the young John Derek), a dentist's son who turns out to be far more conventional than his bride ("This is Italy! Married women do not go wandering around alone!"). This interesting …
Fifth Avenue psychiatrist, all hot and bothered from the tales of bondage of a female patient, unknowingly strikes up an affair with the patient's ex-boyfriend: "You just may be the gentlest man I've ever met." But could he also be the bondage man? Erotic thriller is mostly talk, and all …
A savvy commercial calculation that takes the sport of basketball down to its grass roots: the pickup game on the urban playground, where anyone might aspire to be a Larry Bird For A Day. Woody Harrelson, as a big fish in a small pond, is nothing if not common: the …
A post-Oliver North political intrigue to do with a shady arms deal in the New Mexico desert. Like a lot of thrillers, it sets up all right. An apparent suicide is discovered (gun at one hand, briefcase loaded with half a million dollars at the other) in the bailiwick of …
The essential situation -- the struggle of an eightyish cancer sufferer to maintain control of her own life through the final days of her terminal illness -- seems more novelish than movie-ish in its unrushed, uncontrived, unplotty circumstantiation of a particular way of life. But the conjuring-up of a highly …
Vaporous romantic-comic adventure revolving around a bottle of Bordeaux of 1811 vintage. Penelope Ann Miller is très charmante as the novice wine expert ("This is just the most exciting thing ever in my life"); Timothy Daly leaves something to be desired as the man -- the Bud man, by preference …